Notebook
PUBLIC RELIGION Not around here, says Ellen Willis In a recent article in the Nation ("Freedom from Religion," February 19), Ellen Willis, director of the cultural journalism program at NYU,...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Today, she finds that her liberal and leftist allies have adapted an argument (first advanced on behalf of multiculturalists and sexual liberationists like herself) that in a democracy real tolerance and equality require that a place be made for every view...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...society...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...Seriously practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists know that the juggernaut of religion is a fantasy created by secularists...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...For Willis, there is one absolute for democracy: religion cannot be part of the public conversation...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...Willis also skips over the secular and leftist politics that led Catholic ethnics and working-class voters to take their distance from liberalism and the Democratic Party in 1972...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...As long as religious advocates are willing to take the flak, why should they be ruled out of public debate...
...Which ideas are allowed voice in the public square and which are forbidden...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...At times, these activities coincide with the projects of the secular left, or right, and coalitions form...
...Now, that is antidemocratic...
...Is this a quarrel about democracy or about the definition of democracy, about whose ideas count and whose don't...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels 8 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...On the other hand, if religious advocates can convince others that divorce is not good for children or that teenage motherhood is bad for mothers and children, so much the better for the whole society, secularists included...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...Full disclosure: she also has reference to my work and that of Peter Steinfels...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...In the sixties, she argues, secularists and believers worked together for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, and against poverty and social inequality...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...Dionne and Garry Wills as examples of liberals who are "supporting efforts to dilute the separation of church and state and increasing the power and influence of religion in American life...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Maybe I will...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Conversely, secularists, like Willis, feel vulnerable precisely because they know secularism is no juggernaut either...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...Her assumptions Ivjfesfet 7 about religion/faith/churches, in fact, are the mirror image of the religious right's views of the secular left—powerful conspiracies that are winning in a life-and-death struggle for domination of U.S...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...both religious and secular groups lived under the regime of a shared separationist understanding of the First Amendment She does acknowledge, but underplays, the gap that emerged in 1973 with Roe v. Wade...
...PUBLIC RELIGION Not around here, says Ellen Willis In a recent article in the Nation ("Freedom from Religion," February 19), Ellen Willis, director of the cultural journalism program at NYU, makes a candid, straightforward, and wrong-headed argument about church and state, religion and culture...
...As I was reading her lament, I recalled a similar one in the seventies by peace activist Daniel Berrigan, S.J., regretting attacks from friends on the secular left because he and other Catholics opposed abortion...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...These are the issues that bring religion forcefully into the public square as cultural and political critic...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Who led the opposition to Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America...
...Heads I win, tails you lose...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...For Willis the real troubles began with the religious right's efforts to breach the wall of separation and its insistence that religious interests be heard in civic life...
...Churches, faith, religion (she uses the terms interchangeably) have been there all the time, doing what they usually do: worshiping, meditating, educating, healing, doing good works, encouraging social justice, and sometimes being out and out nutty...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...as well as a danger to religious institutions themselves...
...Begin with Willis's version of recent history...
...Many will recognize in the Bush initiatives a potential danger to the public weal (is this yet another Republican effort to shrink government...
...Is that so...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Then, she mistakes the depth and duration of cooperation: there being little initial disagreement between secularists and religious on goals—ending segregation, ending the war, and ending poverty—neither group had to examine the other's underlying assumptions very closely...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...These eminences can speak for themselves, but it strikes me that Willis mistakes the reach and the power of religion in American society...
...REV...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...But are they obliged to do so...
...Their cooperation, she believes, was based on a shared understanding of the common good, rather than, as now, on efforts of religious liberals and leftists "to promote the power of religion itself or [take] issue with the secular left on specifically religious grounds...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...REV...
...She writes: "One need not trivialize the fears of religious parents [about these issues] to recognize that this is at bottom a complaint against democracy itself...
...Her immediate complaint is Bush II' s establishment of a White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the bipartisan political support it has received...
...and the writings of E.J...
...Willis sums up: "If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist...
...Their lights were not always those of the secular left...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...More appalling, in her view, is the burgeoning emergence (or reemergence) of religion in public life, which gives a basis of support to these faith-based initiatives...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...Religious" ideas about divorce, abortion, samesex marriage, and single parenthood are forbidden speech because they are religious, while "secular" ideas about them are permitted speech...
...That, of course, did not last beyond the violence of 1968...
...More surprising, she misconstrues the First Amendment...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...First, religion is neither burgeoning nor reemerging...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Neither can they expect, as Willis insists, privileged treatment...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Where is Karl Marx when we really need him...
...She insists not only that the wall separating church and state be impenetrable, but that religion be kept out of the public square, because "a genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Her essay, however, suggests quite the opposite...
...This is a plausible interpretation, but Willis underestimates the degree to which religious teachings and sentiments fueled those protest movements and provided both the troops and the mandate for social change...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...It does not take much to elicit from me—and possibly many other Catholics and Christians—some sympathy for her plea for "freedom from religion" in opposing government funding for faith-based initiatives...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Secular ideas enjoy their First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and conscience, while religious ideas are barred because of the nonestablishment clause...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Third, and here I think we arrive at the neuralgic issue: Willis sees programs of sexual liberation—abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, nonmarital sex and childbearing—as the fundamental disagreement between secularists and religious...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...Second, Willis overrates the cohesion and consistency, and thus the power, of religious groups...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...In fact, religious people, with or without allies, went right on acting by their own lights in the public square...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Yet Willis looks back on the sixties as a golden age of good behavior by the churches...
...in some places if s diminishing...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Her broader argument, however—religion out of public life—deserves critical scrutiny...
...Curiously enough for a lefty, Willis never looks at the real juggernaut, the economic forces that are shaping—often with an invisible hand— the culture and politics against which liberals, secularists, and religious often struggle in vain...
...The emergence or dissolution of such coalitions does not rest on attitudes toward the First Amendment, but usually on agreement/disagreement over moral principles or accord/discord on political goals and strategies...
...An astute religious advocate may decide to shape his or her objections to abortion, teenage pregnancy, same-sex marriage, etc., in philosophical, sociological, or political rather than scriptural or doctrinal language...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Marvin, S.D...
...God will hear you...
...And with the culture's gradual obliteration of the divide between public and private, these are precisely the issues that Willis wants removed from the purview of religious tutelage...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...How else do we understand the centrality of Martin Luther King and the black churches to the civil rights movement...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...She cites the campaign speeches of Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
